Kenneth Frampton: Tectonic Form and Public Appearance

What follows is a summary of a lecture by Kenneth Frampton that he held 28 May 2009 at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. This lecture was titled Tectonic Form and Public Appearance.
Frampton begins his lecture by critizing contemporary architects like Herzog de Meuron. According to Frampton these architects put to much emphasize on the skin, and not so much on the tectonic form and the spatial aspects of the building. What is missing is the ‘space of appearance’, a term derived from Hannah Arendt’s influential work The Human Condition (1958). An example of the space of appearance is the acropolis in ancient Athens. However, we have to realize that architecture is not a preexistence for this space of appearance to come into being. This doesn’t mean that architecture is a powerless instrument in society. Frampton formulates it like this:

‘Architecture can still intervene (…) in the urban fabric in a limited way, as an intervention. And this intervention should guarantee this of public appearance.’

The question is now what the characteristics are of this spaces of appearance and Frampton tries to find examples of them in the architectural history. The first one is intercolumniation as in the we see in the temple at Thebes. The hypostyle is announcing the sacral space. This concept of intercolumniation is omnipresent in historical architecture, Frampton also gives the examples of Schinkel’s Altes Museum where the columns announce the central public space. 
The freestanding column can also be seen as a analogue for the human body in the public space.
The second example is the Greek theater where the body politic could gather and transcendent there everyday life. (The life of necessity or labour as Arendt would call it.) Not only provides the Greek theater a place to make this possible, it also expresses it in its tectonic form, this form is an representation of the absent collective body.

The third example is the stair – in its tectonic form it already represents the motion of the human body. I would say that the stair, and the theater are counter-moulds of the public.
Later Frampton comes to speak about the role of architecture. He thinks that it role is twofold: Presentation and Representation. Presentation is about what is provided, the programmatic elements for the realization of the project. Representation is the constructional elements itself that represent the public, think about the examples of the stair, column. In the absence of public you see the representation of the public.
Frampton pays in this lecture a lot of attention to the architecture of Paulo Mendes da Rocha and shows several of his buildings. This because there is – according to Frampton – a relation between the human body and the constructional elements. (He also shows the faculty building of architecture in São Paulo by Vilanova Artigas.)

The limits of Architecture
Answering the questions of the audience Frampton comes to speak about the MUBE, the museum of Brazilian sculpture in São Paulo by Paulo Mendes da Rocha. (See images bottom of the post.) This building defines a beautiful public space, however, after the construction the site is completely fenced. This ruins the building and especially the public character of the project. Frampton reacts on this particular situation in São Paulo:

‘ (…) at some point architecture has its limits. There is a certain dimension where architecture cannot really come into being. I think because society is so stressed by poverty and by the accompanying violence that come along with the poverty [that] architecture come beside to point in a way. The heroic gesture can still be made but they may not be consummated because society is under to much stress. (…) When we get to such a level of paranoia [this] paranoia makes architecture in a society impossible. I mean, if you think about designing embassies today, you need to have two embassies: you need one that is the kind of representational thing where you don’t mind that somebody puts a bomb in it, and you need another embassy which is a bunker. (…) That kind of paranoia is a killer. It is the opposite of a society of risk.’

São Paulo: The appearance of the dual city

Summary from:
Luiz Recamán, ‘High-speed urbanization’ in: Elisabetta Andreoli, Adrian Forty (ed.), Brazil’s Modern Architecture, Phaidon Press Limited, London, 2004, p. 134-138.

Luiz Recamán has been an architect since 1983. Having gained a PhD in Philosophy, he now teaches Aesthetics at the São Carlos School of Engineering of the University of São Paulo (USP) and has published articles in various journals.

The process of segregation finds its origin in the abolishment of slavery, according to Luiz Recamán. The former slaves were of no use anymore to the landowners, and in there eyes also unsuited for paid employment. These people started to move to the city hoping to find work there. At the same moment however the Brazilian government actively encourage people in Europe to come to Brazil to do the jobs that has been done by the slaves. The black population had therefore no official role in society and also no place to live. Form this was the moment that the illegal settlement at the periphery of the city started to appear. Although these settlements were illegal, they were tolerated. Luiz Recamán sees this as the birth of the ‘dual society, in which pre-modern social relations, inherited from the colonial structure, were updated but not fundamentally changed, to fulfill new roles in modernization.’ Poor people from the periphery became the small service providers of the rich. The autoconstructed neighborhoods in the periphery never became official parts of the city and therefore lacked public services.
While at the moment the Brazils population as a whole is decreasing, the number of people who started to live in a favela grew. In São Paulo there was a growth of 4,6 percent - in the district of Guarulhos they grew with the enormous amount of 112 percent. The migration to the autoconstructed periphery during the 90s coincided with the implosion of the rental marked. ‘Between 1994 and 1998, the number of families living in favelas in the city of São Paulo grew with 47 percent. ‘The ‘Map of Social Exclusion’, which indicates differences in the quality of life in São Paulo’s districts, shows an emptying of the regulated, legal areas of the city towards the unregulated outskirts. Between 1991 and 1996 there was an increase of 470,000 inhabitants in the 53 districts where the quality of life was deemed to have worsened, while within the 37 districts where the quality of life had improved, there was a decrease of 260,000 inhabitants.
Luiz Recamán distinguishes two different dynamics that caused the contemporary spatial and social layout of the city: ‘economic gain and social segregation.’
In the centre of São Paulo there are at the moment a lot of empty buildings. The reason is that a lot of business, shopping, luxery housing culture and leisure has moved to the south-west of the city where the land is cheaper. Investment produces higher rates of return here than in the city center. [A consequence of this that the empty buildings in the center are squatted by the poor, a phenomenon that is called cortiços in Brazil. The precarious situation people live in are grinding; in many case families live in very small spaces, sharing sanitary facilities with a lot of people. These people pay a lot of rent and have no rights at all because the occupation is in many cases illegal. JvB]
‘At the same time, increasing violence, the result of a massive degree of social exclusion, pushes the wealthy inside their homes.’ Recamán sees the deterioration of the public spaces as a result of the overvaluation of the private sphere. Another aspect in this is that the private investors are not interested in public space.

[The other chapter can also be interesting: they are all written by Brazilian scholars.]

City of Walls: Summary Introduction. ANTHROPOLOGY WITH AN ACCENT

Het omniversum van angst en criminaliteit had basaal gezien twee manieren van discriminatie tot gevolg: de privatisering van veiligheid en de ‘seclusion’ van sommige sociale groepen in gefortifiseerde enclaves. Beide processen veranderde het idee van de publieke ruimte en van het publiek.
Over de enclaves: ‘the new model of segregation separates social groups with an explicitness that transforms the quality of public space. … The new urban environment that enforces and values inequalities and separations is an undemocratic and nonmodern public space.’
Het onderzoek van Caldeira strekt zich uit van 1988 tot 2000. Ze deed onderzoek naar drie verschillende gebieden in de stad:
1. Poor working-class periphery, created through ‘autoconstruction’. Most of her research was conducted in Jardim das Camélias, in the eastern part of São Miguel Paulista.
2. Lower-middle-class neighborhood close to downtown: Moόca, an deindustrialised area with a lot of cortiços.
3. upper-middle-class neighborhoods: Morumbi and Alto de Pinheiros. Closed condominiums.

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p1-16.